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Abstract

The two group leaders will gather a group a researchers to address a cluster of questions that have engaged both of us for many years, but in relation to which we have taken contrasting positions and offered different kinds of answers. The aim of the group is to establish an ongoing dialogue between two different theoretical positions in order to address a fundamental question: How do subjectivities develop in the tension between social identity-construction and meaning-making and personal emotional meaning?Hanne Haavind’s work is positioned within cultural psychology, emphasizing the study of power relations of the situation and the explicit and negotiated meanings that are exchanged between the participants. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen bases her work in recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and emphasizes unconscious meaning and emotional investment as part of the human experience and capacity. Taking these differences as our point of departure, we want to create new knowledge about the relation between personal identity and development, on the one hand, and social and cultural processes of change on the other. The project will improve the understanding of the mutual relation between the social and the personal – as both aspects can be seen in a perspective of temporal change. The participants in the group will pose the questions specifically in relation the psychological development of children and young people in a historical period when previously relatively stable categories of identity, like gender and age, have increasingly come under pressure and are challenged by the ethnic diversity present in the everyday life of children and young people. How do children and young people develop through contexts, and how are contexts transformed through new generations of young people growing up? The theoretical understanding will be developed in a way that relates closely to empirical analysis. Participants who represent different theoretical positions and different methodological approaches to reading and interpreting empirical material, and they will al bring their own recordings from interviews and naturalistic observations in order to test and compare different analytical approaches. Confronting different positions will hopefully create an analytic tension that we, after several decades of disagreement, intend to turn into a fruitful dialogue.